formats
...ar or anxiety associated with real or anticipated communication with others. Basically I find that it means to be nervous or scared about speaking to people in any type of contexts, whether it is one on one, or to a large audience. There are four contexts in which communication apprehension occurs and they are trait-like, audience-based, situational, and context-based communication apprehension. Trait-like apprehension is when you feel anxious about speaking in most situations, whether you are talking one-on-one, in a small group or during a large speech. Audience-based communication apprehension is when a person feels particularly anxious only about communicating with a certain person or group of people. Situational is a short-lived feeling of anxiety that occurs during a specific encounter. For example you may feel anxious while telling someone you lost their favorite shirt you borrowed or that while you were walking their dog it ran away. Finally Contest-based apprehension is when a person feels anxious only in a particular setting. There are four such settings that they may occur in, public speaking, meetings, group discussions, and one-to-one. When I was growing up as a child I don’t remember ever having a bad experience with public speaking or with speaking to anyone in particular. I was not very shy when I started school but that changed in about grade five or six. This is when kids start to change their views and everyone wants to be noticed. It didn’t matter to me if I was noticed or not so I would choose to not voice my opinion as to having everyone’s eyes on me. In grade six every time my name was called during roll call one of the boys in my class thought it was funny to quietly say inappropriate things to me while I was about to speak. This embarrassed me and in turn made me dread doing roll call every day. From here in junior high I would turn bright red and stumble with my words while I was reading in class. Then every time I was asked to read it would just keep getting worse and worse because I knew I was going to have to do it and I would get scared that I was going to make a fool of myself. So today this I feel is the main reason that I am so frightened to give speeches in class. I am afraid that I am going to be made a spectacle of. I know what happens when I get up there, my face turns red, I talk fast, and sometimes I stumble over my words, and because of this I feel that people are going to laugh at me or think I am ‘different.’ So I feel that I would fit into the context-based communication apprehension during public speeches. It is only here that I am absolutely terrified to talk. 3) One difference between listening and hearing is that listening is a psychological process while hearing is a physiological process. Hearing is a biological function but listening occurs when we choose to attach meaning to what we are hearing. Just because you hear something doesn’t mean that you are listening to it or acknowledging that you heard it. Listening is the process of receiving, attending to, construction meaning from, and responding to spoken or nonverbal messages. For example when you are out in a large crowd you hear a lot of voices and conversations going on around you but you don’t always listen to what is being said. However when you hear your alarm clock go off in the morning you hear it and listen to it for a few seconds before it irritates you enough that you turn it off. Critical listening involves hearing, understanding, evaluating, and assigning worth to a message. I feel that the most important part of critical listening is to hear the message, because if you don’t hear it nothing else can be done, and ultimately it makes it impossible to listen critically. Second most important is to understand the message that has been given. If you can speak clearly and get your message across this is going to be the best way for an audience to understand and interpret what you are saying. The third step is evaluating the message. You judge it’s strengths and weaknesses, decide whether you like it or not and also wheth...